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Continuous quality improvement is an integral part of Sunshine Terrace Foundation’s organizational culture. A community sponsored health care service, the Logan, Utah-based non-profit has been providing quality healthcare for 56 years, serving over 250 patients each day.

In keeping with the organization’s goal of continual process improvements, management took a hard look at how it was allocating its resources. When the finance and budget committee reviewed costs associated with managing human resource functions, they were astonished to learn that the homegrown HR system that had been developed in-house was costing the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain. Approximately $100,000 in labor per year was being spent on system maintenance and this didn’t include the thousands of hours that went into adding new features that were needed by the department – costs that far exceeded the non-profit’s 5.4% budgeted administrative costs.

"Our IT department created a program that attempted to address and streamline all of our HR tasks, but time spent maintaining the system and adding new features as needs dictated was costing way too much time and money – it just didn’t make sense to keep that program in place," said David Seria, director of human resources. "We couldn’t access the HR database, and if we needed a report, IT had to reprogram the system to enable us to write the report. I recall one report we needed took nearly 5,000 hours of labor and approximately six months to complete. Our homegrown system was costing us exponentially more per year in programming hours than had we implemented a true HR management system."

Given the time and money spent maintaining their in-house system, Seria began a search for a quality HR management system. While researching systems on the Web, he discovered an HR management system, HROffice, from Ascentis Corporation. HROffice automates HR workflow processes to enable HR departments to improve management of employee compensation and benefits ranging from personal data, benefits, compensation history, employee leave, COBRA, OSHA compliance, and more. HROffice’s custom reports feature allows users to generate information within minutes – a feature that was critical to Sunshine Terrace’s operations.

"We evaluated lots of different software that was more expensive. The key features we needed in a system were employee data and compensation, FMLA information, COBRA, the ability to create tabs, information on benefits and attendance, and most important, the ability to interpret our data. HROffice meets all of these needs," said Seria.

Report generation now possible with HROffice

Sunshine Terrace implemented HROffice in spring 2004, a task that Seria said was a breeze. "Ease of use and implementation was key. In fact we were able to implement the system without IT’s help," said Seria.

Seria said they are now able to produce reports – a task they could not do before. "Given our limitations with the old in-house system, we could not produce reports at all since despite our best efforts. We just simply could not access our database to pull the necessary information," said Seria.

Seria also said that HROffice has sped up the entire process of managing information, freeing him up to focus on more strategic initiatives. "Because my role has expanded, I don’t have as much time to spend on day to day HR tasks, meaning I’ve delegated most tasks to my assistant. The ease of use and intuitive nature of HROffice has made it easy for my assistant to enter data and perform other functions, which frees me up for strategic planning."

Time savings critical

Time is valuable to Sunshine Terrace, and HROffice is helping Seria’s department save thousands of hours previously spent adding new features and functionality.

"HROffice saves us valuable time," said Seria. "It addresses all of our HR needs and improves our time management. For example, when we had to generate COBRA reports previously, it was extremely difficult. Now, the program is set up to help us quickly generate COBRA and EEO reports and save valuable time."

Regulatory requirements, training easier to manage

Sunshine Terrace also conducts mandatory training on a variety of topics. With HROffice, they are able to monitor who has received training, who needs training, and provide reports to the various government agencies.

"We provide mandatory staff training on numerous topics ranging from therapy to medicare, and need to ensure our staff is up to date on their training requirements and be able to provide reports on training to meet state, federal, and JACHO requirements to prove who has received training and when," said Seria. "In the past, it was a big problem trying to stay on top of this information since we had one big manual to refer to and paperwork gets lost – making audits a nightmare. Now, HROffice enables us to see who needs training – all of which is critical in staying on top of our many regulatory requirements. Plus, we’re able to reduce errors since we’re able to account for all of our training."

In summary, Seria says, "Everyone should have HROffice; it is user friendly and enables us to get work done quickly. We are extremely pleased by not only the time savings but also the cost savings we’ve realized as a result of implementing HROffice."

About Ascentis Corporation and the HROffice product line

For over a decade, Ascentis’ HROffice product line has been automating HR and benefits processes for small and mid-sized organizations nationwide. Today HROffice reduces HR and benefits costs for over 1,200 companies ranging from professional service and manufacturing firms to government and non-profit agencies. Connect, communicate, and control all aspects of HR with HROffice.

Ascentis is proud to have been named by Workforce Management to its hot list of the "Top HRMS Providers" for the second year in a row in 2005. For more information on Ascentis Corporation and the HROffice product line, visit www.ascentis.com or call 800.229.2713.